Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The 2025 Nobel Prizes

Starting point is 00:00:00 Every year the Nobel Prize Committee awards the Nobel Prize in accordance with the will of Alfred Nobel. Save for the years where there have been World Wars, the prize has been given annually since 2001. The 2025 prizes have just been announced, and each recipient has made a unique contribution for which they have been recognized. Learn more about the 2025 Nobel Prize recipients and the work that they were recognized for on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.

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Starting point is 00:01:23 and to provide a summary of the work they did to receive their prize. In many cases, especially in the Science Awards, their work is often not understood by most people. So I figured I would take that job upon myself. So let's start with the oddball award in the Nobel Prizes, the Prize for Literature. The winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize for Literature is the Hungarian writer Laslo Krasnahorkei. The reason why the Literature Prize is such an oddball is that the Nobel Committee has to recognize work that's done all over the world. In the case of literature, that's difficult because there are so many different languages that authors write in. Almost every year, no one has heard of the winner in literature because unless you happen to speak that language, you've probably never heard of them.

Starting point is 00:02:12 The Nobel Committee recognized Krasnahorkeye for, quote, his compelling and visionary uvra that in the midst of apocalyptic terror reaffirms the power of art. Kresnahorquois is often described as the kind of epic writer in a central European tradition going back through writers like Franz Kafka, whose style was marked by what critics call absurdism and grotesque excess. His novels frequently follow characters in decaying, marginal communities, or in circumstances of collapse or disorder. Perhaps his best-known work is Santantango, written in 1985, which explores a collapsing rural community in Hungary, portraying disintegration, deceit, despair, and the presence of human connection. That novel became a landmark in Hungarian literature and was also adapted into a film.

Starting point is 00:03:00 The book was also awarded the International Booker Prize in 2015 for its translation into English. By all accounts, he's a great writer, but not that many people speak Hungarian, so he isn't that well known outside of Hungary. The winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize is Maria Corina Machado of Venezuela. Maria Carina Machado received the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for leading a broad, largely nonviolent movement to restore democratic rights in Venezuela after years of repression under President Nicholas Maduro. The Nobel Committee's press release described her as a brave committed champion who kept

Starting point is 00:03:38 the flame of democracy alive by insisting on free elections, accountable government, and the right of Venezuelans to choose their leaders. It highlights her decision to remain in the country despite threats, legal disqualifications from the 2024 presidential race, and an active arrest warrant, framing her struggle as a push for a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy. Peace prizes tend to fall into one of three buckets. The first are diplomats or politicians who bring about a peace or some end to hostilities. This is how Henry Kissinger, Anwar Sadat, Yasser Arafat, and Theodore Roosevelt were awarded their peace prizes. However, there aren't a lot of opportunities to give these sort of prizes away.

Starting point is 00:04:19 The second bucket is General do-gooderers. They're usually involved in some international organization, are a global organization, or just generally promote something that is considered good. This is how Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Jimmy Carter, and the International Red Cross were all awarded prizes. The final category includes people who are fighting against. an authoritarian country, and the Nobel Committee selects them to send a message. Recent recipients from China, Russia, and Iran all fall into this category, as does Maria

Starting point is 00:04:49 Karina Machado. This is the Nobel Committee sending a message to Nicholas Maduro in Venezuela. The 2025 Swedish Central Bank Prize in Economic Sciences in the memory of Alfred Nobel, not one of the original Nobel Prizes, was awarded the three recipients. Yoel Moquille of Northwestern University, Philippe Egyon of the London School of Economics, and Peter Howitt of Brown University. Collectively, they were awarded for showing,

Starting point is 00:05:18 from different angles, how invention and the spread of new ideas power long-term growth and rising standards of living. The committee split the prize into two parts. Mokiel received one half for explaining the historical conditions that allow science and practical know-how to reinforce each other and keep progress going. He used evidence from events like the Industrial Revolution to argue that growth is not automatic.

Starting point is 00:05:42 It depends on a culture that tolerates new ideas, open exchange of knowledge, and institutions that do not punish change. In short, he identified the preconditions that make continuous technical advancement possible rather than rare. Egyon and Howitt shared the other half for building a formal theory of what Joseph Schumpeter called creative destruction. In their model researchers and firms invest in new tech technologies that replace older ones. That replacement raises productivity and incomes over time, yet also creates disruption that policy must manage. Their work shows why competition, entry of new firms, and incentive for research and development matter, and why policies that block rivals or

Starting point is 00:06:24 protect outdated production methods can slow economic growth. The model helps explain real-world patterns, like why countries that invest in education in research, keep markets open to newcomers, and regulate monopolies carefully, can tend to grow faster in the long run. The 2025 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology was awarded to Mary Bruchnow and Fred Ramsdahl of the Seltek Corporation and Shimon Sakaguchi of Osaka University. Their work had to do with bettering our understanding of the human immune system. Our immune system has a big job. It has to fight off infections without damaging our own tissues. If that balance fails, the immune system.

Starting point is 00:07:05 might attack the body itself, leading to autoimmune diseases, like type 1 diabetes, lupus, multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis, and so on. Before this work, scientists knew that some immune cells are eliminated early in life through a process called central tolerance, which removes immune cells that strongly target the body's own proteins. But that did not fully explain why many people never develop autoimmunity and how the immune system restrains itself later in the body's tissues. The concept of peripheral tolerance is that even after immune cells mature, there must be checks that prevent them from attacking the body.

Starting point is 00:07:45 Sakaguchi was the first proposed and experimentally show that a special class of immune cells act like internal peacekeepers in the body. In the mid-1990s, he found that in mice, when certain subsets of T-cells were missing or removed, the mice developed autoimmune disease. but if he gave those mice the missing cells from healthy animals, the disease went away. That led him to postulate the existence of regulatory T cells, which suppress or restrain other immune cells from attacking the body. Later, Bruncow and Ramsdell made a key advance by identifying the genetic control behind those

Starting point is 00:08:22 regulatory T cells. In mice with a lethal autoimmune disorder known as scurphy, Brun cow and Ramsdale found a mutation in an X-chromazone gene encoding a protein, they at first called scurfin and later named Foxp3. So why is this important? Well, it brings us a step closer to understanding autoimmune diseases and how possibly to cure them. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry

Starting point is 00:08:48 was awarded to Susumu Kittagawa of Kyoto University, Richard Robson of the University of Melbourne, and Omar Yagi of the University of California, Berkeley. The three laureates, developed and refined a new type of molecular architecture called metal organic frameworks, often abbreviated as MOFs. These are crystalline materials built by combining metallic atoms and organic molecules in a repeating lattice-like pattern. What is special is that these frameworks contain internal cavities or empty pores through which other molecules, like gases or water vapors,

Starting point is 00:09:24 can flow, enter, exit, or even be stored. The outer shape of the material makes it. The outer shape of the material may look solid, but inside, it's a huge internal surface area filled with space. The idea is that by picking which metal and which organic linker molecules to use, you can control the size, shape, and chemical properties of those pores so the MOFs can selectively trap or release certain molecules. In that sense, an MOF is like a highly customized sponge or network of tunnels at the molecular scale. So why is this important?

Starting point is 00:09:59 Because MOFs have huge internal surface areas and controllable pores, they can interact with many molecules in ways that conventional solids cannot. They could potentially capture CO2 molecules, particulate pollutants, or even water directly from the atmosphere. They can also potentially be used as catalysts in chemical reactions. The final prize I'll be covering, which was actually the one awarded first, is the prize for physics. The 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to John Clark of the University of California Berkeley, Michael Devereate of Yale University, and John Martinez of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Starting point is 00:10:38 The prize committee said the award was given for, quote, the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit. Okay, so what does that mean? particles at the quantum level behave very differently from things that we're used to dealing with at the macroscopic level. In particular, in quantum physics, a particle sometimes tunnels through a barrier that it shouldn't be able to cross in classical physics. What Clark, Devereate, and Martinez showed is that under the right conditions, this behavior can manifest at scales larger than the quantum level.

Starting point is 00:11:16 The setting for their experiments was a superconducting circuit. If you recall from a previous episode on the subject, a superconductor is a material that, when cooled to extremely low temperatures, allows electric current to flow without any resistance. In their design, they used a special element called a Josephson Junction, which is two superconductors separated by a very thin insulating barrier. Normally, current can't flow through an insulator, but in quantum mechanics, tuddling can occur. The experimenters took a superconducting circuit, then measured how it behaved under different electrical biases and under microwaves.

Starting point is 00:11:54 The circuit was small but big enough to be seen in a microscope and still much larger than the quantum level. They observed two major things. First, the circuit sometimes jumped from one side to the other by tunneling through the barrier, something that should be impossible in classical physics. Second, when they applied microwaves of certain frequencies, the circuit absorbed energy only in discrete amounts, showing quantized energy levels. And if you remember back to my episode on the ultraviolet catastrophe, discrete amounts of energy means it can be at one level or another, but nothing in between. So, why is this important? First, they bridge the gap between the

Starting point is 00:12:38 quantum world and the larger macroscopic world. Before these experiments, many physicists assume that quantum effects like tunneling or discrete energy levels would be unobservable in large systems because of all the noise and interaction. Their work proved that, at least in carefully engineered systems, it was possible to preserve quantum behavior even at scales large enough to be used in devices. Second, their experiments laid foundational groundwork for quantum technologies, especially quantum computing, quantum sensors, and quantum cryptography. The circuits they studied are closely related to superconducting qubits used in many of today's quantum computer designs. In third, this work helps to improve ultra-sensitive

Starting point is 00:13:22 measurement devices. The ability to observe quantum effects in circuits helps build sensors that can detect extremely weak signals or changes because quantum systems can be extremely sensitive. This has implications in fields like magnetic resonance imaging or MRI, precision measurement devices and possibly new kinds of detectors. There's often been controversies in the awarding of Nobel Prizes. However, I think the 2025 selections are pretty good. Some of the awards, especially in the sciences, might actually have a role to play in shaping our future in the years to come.

Starting point is 00:14:02 The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. your support helps make this podcast possible. And I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord. That's where everything happens that's outside the podcast. And links to those are available in the show notes. As always, if you leave a review on any major podcast app or in the above community groups,

Starting point is 00:14:29 you two can have it read in the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The 2025 Nobel Prizes

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